Assignment 3-1

*Just as a side note, I was looking up some different ways that reporters tend to write columns and i came up with some interesting stuff. I thought that I would try to write this assignment in the style that I found to be most effective for me, a style where the reporter almost spoke to me personally. It was not casually written per say, but it was a little less formal, and i thought with a topic that was more of my opinion it would be fitting.

January 28, 2010

Is the world going towards journalistic convergence or consolidation? For some reason, in the back of my head, I want to scream “NO!” and give you a billion reasons that we should not be moving in either one of those directions… but the hard truth is that we are.
Convergence is described as “the approach towards a definite value, a definite point, a common view or opinion, or a towards a fixed or equilibrium state.” (www.wikipedia.ore/wiki/convergence) This means that everything is constantly changing and evolving to get more streamline and able to fit into every ones fast pace life. If you think back to about 10 years ago, technologically, everything was extremely different. Logging onto your e-mail was not the 1 minute process that it is now, where I can log into my email, see what is in my inbox, and log out in under 3 minutes…multiple times a day. You were not connected to your wireless network all day so there was not that quick access log in. There was dial up. You had to log onto your account and listen to that awful static and beeping combination while you slowly connect to Internet explorer. Then, you had to patiently wait second after second for your page to finally load and allow you to read your spam.
Internet was only the beginning of it. Telephones, something made strictly for calls, turned into something made for calls anywhere, the Internet, making videos, taking picture, playing games, playing music, even finding all the “Thai Restaurants” in the greater Bangor area. That is 6 different gizmos all put into one to make our lives easier. And we love it. This technological convergence really thrives on the shifts within industries, cultures, socially, and how we interact with the technologies that exist.
There are a few down sides however. When an appliance is made for a specific function, then you add on other things that it is supposed to do, those add on functions never seem to work quite as well as if they had been made specifically for that function. For example, if you try to play a DVD in an Xbox consol there seems to be way more issues then if you had just used a DVD player.
As far as consolidation, or getting rid of forms of media and combining them all into one, I have to say that this is not going to happen in my lifetime or yours more than likely. I do believe that there is going to be a time when news papers are not printed and everyone just goes online to read the news, although it would take just about every person in the world having some sort of smart phone (Media Convergence!!). People like to be connected and know what is going on, and until everyone has a hand held device that will allow them to do so, there will always be the printed-paper.